Local Route Recovery Algorithms for Improving Multihop TCP Performance in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Abstract

TCP (transmission control protocol) will for sure continue to be the major transport protocol in wireless environments, due to its large install-base in existing applications. Indeed, in future ad hoc wireless networks where devices communicate among each other over multihop routes, TCP is expected to be the prominent protocol for data exchange (e.g., multihop wireless FTP). However, there is a severe performance degradation in using TCP over a wireless link. Despite that there are a large number of wireless TCP adaptation schemes proposed in the literature, improving TCP performance over a multihop wireless route is still very much unexplored. In this paper, we propose local route recovery approaches for improving the performance of multihop wireless TCP. Our simulation results generated by NS-2 indicate that the local recovery approaches outperform complete replacement approaches (i.e., using full-blown ad hoc routing protocols such as AODV and DSR) in terms of end-to-end delay, throughput, packet delivery rate, and control overhead.